3 Reasons Your Online Business is Failing (And What to Do About It)

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A lot of businesses fail. It’s the reality of entrepreneurship. However, the
Internet business sector has a different mentality. Just as many
of these businesses fail as do business in other sectors, but
there’s often a victim mentality at play with online businesses.

Online business owners somehow believe that their business is
failing in spite of them—when the reality is that it’s failing
because of them.

Internet businesses often fail for the following three
reasons. If this sounds like your business, you can
still do something about it before it’s too late.

1. You don’t have a business model

Figure out your business model from the start.
Don’t fool yourself and say that you’ll figure one out when you
get X amount of readers, users or another arbitrary number. Those
vanity metrics don’t really mean anything. Hammer out your
business model as soon as you start your business.

Answer this one question: How many different
ways can someone give you money?

If the answer is zero, you have a problem. If people can’t pay
you for anything, don’t be surprised if and when they…gasp!…don’t
give you money.

You are not Instagram.
Facebook
will not buy you out of the blue for $1 billion. Build a business
model into your business from the get-go and don’t wait for the
money part to “just happen.”

How to fix this problem: Create a product
answering someone’s question. Offer a service to solve someone’s
problem. You can even put a big donation button on your site.
Whatever you do, create at least one way for people to give you
money. Yes, it’s that simple.

2. You still think it’s all about you

Nope. That’s not how it works.

Build something for others. Find out what
problems they have. Then solve them.

I don’t care how much you love ice cream. If you all you want to
do is eat ice cream and talk about ice cream all day, you’ll
never actually have a business (you’ll just spend a lot of time
eating ice cream and getting fat).

Instead, try ranking, curating and organizing all the best types
of ice cream out there. Help ice cream parlors promote their
businesses and bring in more customers. If you’re feeling
particularly gung-ho, create your own brand of ice cream that is
somehow better than all the other brands of ice cream out there.

Bloggers fall into this trap all the time. They want to talk
about what they’re interested in—instead of talking what other
people want to talk about or solving problems other people need
solved.

For example, instead of blogging about your transformation on
the Paleo diet, try sharing helpful resources,
tools and food lists to help others make the
transition, too. Yes, your story is interesting, but the tools
are more useful to other people and thus more valuable.

How to fix this problem: Cut yourself out of the
equation. Talk obsessively to other people about what they
need—then deliver it.

3. You think “online business” means “easy business”

Too many people think they just need an Internet connection to
get started. They somehow think that also means that as long as
they have a website, all the other hard parts of business go
away. Not true!

Remember the whole problem-solving thing we mentioned earlier?
That means you have to actually do work, so bust out some
elbow grease! The reason it’s a problem in the first
place is because there was enough of a barrier at some point in
time for someone to think “this is hard” and give up before
solving it.

That means you need to step in and fill that space. It might not
be easy, but it’s probably not as difficult as you imagine it to
be, either.

Regardless of the difficulty, if you can fix a problem or find a
solution for someone’s pain, there’s a good chance they’ll pay
for your service or product.